Rant: Spinning

I love spin classes. Not as much as riding my bike outside, but it's good for the wintertime. Having someone yelling at me to go harder is a hell of a lot better than trying to suffer through long sets in front of some DVD in my living room. And for some reason, I'm far more likely to go to the gym and do my workout than just sit on the trainer at home. I have done spin classes from California to Barcelona. Once I did 5 consecutive hours of spin classes. Like I said, spinning is great... BUT some things really bug me about spinning.

1. What in the hell is first position? Third position is something like having your hands on the brake hoods. I get it. Second position is like having your hands on the crossbar of your handlebars. Okay, I do that sometimes. But first position is like holding your handlebar stem. What the fuck is that?! You get on your bike and you ride 100 feet standing up with your hands in "first position", and when you get out of the hospital, you tell me how it worked out for you. Now tell me why my spin instructor wants us to spend all our standing time in first position. And that's not just this one instructor either, it's everywhere!

2. I spend about 5% of the time on my bike standing when I'm on the road, and even that's a bit much. Why do I spend 60% of my spin class standing up?

3. The music that you like to listen to in your car is NOT necessarily the best music for your spin class. I do not want to do a tough climbing set to Dave Matthews Band's Crash Into Me, nor do I want to climb to anything by Cold Play (who cares which song, they all sound the same anyway). I don't want to sprint to Matchbox 20. When I'm spinning, I want to listen to music that makes me want to dance, not music that makes me want to run out of Abercrombie and Fitch screaming. The cheesier, the better: Madonna, Come on Eileen, One Way or Another, It's Raining Men, Super Freak, that sort of thing... There is no excuse for Smashmouth, ever. There! I said it!

4. If someone walks in to your class wearing a cycling jersey, bike shorts, cycling shoes, and a heartrate monitor, do NOT ask them if they are new to spin and offer to help them adjust their bike. Just don't.

5. People should not be bouncing on their bikes, least of all the instructor. There's this one instructor at the Y who bounces so hard in her saddle I think that the whole seat is going to break off. She looks like a woodpecker with her head bobbing back and forth like that. Is she riding with NO resistance on her flywheel? And your elbows should be relaxed, but you should not look like a meth head doing the Chicken Dance. It makes me want to walk up to her bike and give the resistance knob a big, fat turn. Then I will tell her that I will keep turning it until she can sit still!

6. Only insecure guys with small penises put their bikes away without taking the resistance off. Only insecure guys with even smaller penises turn the tension up before getting off the bike.

7. In theory the resistance (in spin classes I've been in anyway) is on a perceived exertion scale from 1 to 10. But if we never, ever, ever, ever go past an 8, even in the most extreme circumstances; and we never, ever, ever go below a 4 , even when we're warming up. Isn't that really a scale from 4 to 8? And, really, if we're only using a 4-point range of our 10-point system, why do we go from 5 to 5.5 to 6 to 6.5? Why don't we just start at 1 and use all the numbers?

8. And while we're on the subject of resistance: let's talk about sprints. If, according to my friendly spin instructor, a 4 is that level where the pedals are doing half the work for you, then it's fine to make us pedal as fast as we can, but please don't call it a "sprint". On a real bicycle if you got in your small ring and were riding in your easiest gears and spun out at 130 rpm, you probably wouldn't get above about 12 miles per hour, and you would probably fall off your bike. So we can call it a drill, but please, let's not call it a sprint. Let's save the word "sprint" for when there's resistance on the pedals, okay?

9. People who whoop and yell in spin classes make me cringe in embarrassment, but if no one whoops or screams in your spin classes, then the class is BORING and the instructor's not making us work hard enough!